Dairy Arts Center

VISUAL ARTS

ON VIEW NOW

BRUTAL REALITIES
Opening reception: January 17, 2020 from 5-8pm

Michael Theodore
Annette Isham
Regan Rosburg
Natascha Seideneck
TECHNE Lab
Déesse, Jon J. Satrom, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Mark Amerika, Melanie Clemmons, Ryan Wurst, Rick Silva, Nicholas O’Brien and Mariana Pereira Vieira
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An exploration of alternate and real-life hard to believe realities.

[Hand-Rudy] Natascha Seideneck and Regan Rosburg
[Polly Addison] Michael Theodore
[MacMillan] Annette Isham
[McMahon] TECHNE Lab with Déesse, Jon J. Satrom, Laura Hyunjhee Kim, Melanie Clemmons, Ryan Wurst, Rick Silva, Nicholas O’Brien and Mariana Pereira Vieira

Curatorial statement: 

Co-curated by Drew Austin and Mark Amerika, Brutal Realities exposes how contemporary artists confront their shifting nature of reality in digitally mediated culture. This manifests through various artistic mediums but focuses on artists working in the field of new media art. Presented primarily through video, sound, animation, photography, performance, and digital manipulation, the exhibition features artists who have shown their work nationally and internationally, all of whom have developed their work while living in Colorado.

Each artist in the exhibition brings their unique style of manipulating data to form a different approach toward the precarious cultural and political situation we find ourselves in. Some of the artists choose to use humor and post-internet parody to send a direct message, while others use abstraction, movement, and color to evoke an emotion or line of inquiry. Throughout the exhibition, viewers get critical insights into a world mediated through technology. Brutal Realities invites you to question the world around you and rethink what it means to be alive at a time of global climate crisis, cross-generational existential angst, and information overload.

OPENING RECEPTION & PERFORMANCE:
Brutal Realities will open on Friday, Jan. 17th at 5:00pm. At 6:00pm a brief introduction and discussion of the works on view will be made.The reception is an opportunity to meet and mingle with the artists and curators. Light fare for attendees, plus drinks available for purchase. All receptions are free and open to the public. 

A special live audio/visual performance from exhibiting and visiting artists will be presented in the Carsen Theater from 7:30 – 8:30pm. Click here for more information and to register.

Artist Bios

MACMILLIAN

Annette Isham: Annette Isham currently lives and works in Denver, Colorado. Isham received her B.A. in Studio Art at the University of Richmond and an M.F.A. from The American University. She was awarded a fellowship at the Hamiltonian Gallery in Washington, DC, where she has shown two solo exhibitions. Isham has exhibited nationally including Condition X at Westside Gallery in NYC and Man as Object, Reversing the Gaze at SOMArts in San Francisco. This last summer Isham exhibited her series, Among The Multitudes, at CURRENTS International Media Festival in Santa Fe. Isham has recently completed a residency at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO. Currently, she is teaching Time-Based Media classes at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.
 
HAND/RUDY
Regan Rosburg: Regan Rosburg is an artist, naturalist and writer. Her work is founded in the principles of Ecopsychology, which she describes as society’s collective grief, environmental melancholia, and “collective social mania” (her term).  Rosburg believes these issues manifest in a relentless loop of consumption, distraction, and unresolved mourning. She is also completely enamored by the beauty, intelligence and resilience of nature, and finds inspiration from combining art with science. She fervently believes that artists are a crucial voice in discussing climate change and human impact. 
 

Rosburg works in a variety of materials to blur the boundary between nature and culture. She is known for her increasingly complex 3D resin work that contains plant and animal relics, bones, insects, lace and painted imagery. Recently she has expanded into making installations, as well as recycled plastic and virgin plastic sculptures. She is currently working towards using more biological and temporary materials, including coffee-based photographic printing, algae, moss, and ice.

Currently, Regan Rosburg is an artist in residence at Redline (Denver, CO), as well as the S*Park Visiting Artist for 2019/2020. She is represented by William Havu Gallery in Denver, Colorado.

Natascha Seideneck: Natascha Seideneck was born in Germany, grew up in England lives in Denver, Colorado. Her work is interdisciplinary, often engaging in experimental processes that integrate still and time-based visual technologies. In particular, she is interested in how land is surveyed and surveilled, within historical and contemporary contexts. Natascha has exhibited widely and produced numerous site-specific artworks, often collaborating with artists, designers and architects. She holds an MFA from Tufts University and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Metro State University of Denver. Natascha is a member of Tank Studios and recently was as a resident artist at Hangar in Lisbon, Portugal.
 
POLLY ADDISON
Michael Theodore: Michael Theodore was born and raised in New York City, and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado. Inspired by observations and experiences of the natural world, Theodore

creates dynamic fields of color, light, and sound in a large variety of mediums. Theodore’s works of interactive kinetic installation, sound, music, light, and moving images have been presented across the United States, and in Mexico, Trinidad y Tobago, Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, France, Australia, Japan, and China.

Theodore holds faculty appointments at the University of Colorado, Boulder with the College of Music (music composition and technology), the Department of Art and Art History (by courtesy), and is Director of the ATLAS Institute’s Center for Media, Arts, and Performance, a venue for experimental media created with technology. Theodore received degrees from Amherst College, Yale (MM), and UCSD (Ph.D.). 

MCMAHON 
Déesse: Déesse is a multi-ethnic multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores and expands the limits of traditional media—painting and drawing, digital printmaking, sculptural installation, performance and oral storytelling, film, video and experimental sounds. Her work is a meditation on the power of imagery and object-making to represent trauma and death and the state of the world as observed through the eyes of a woman of African descent: it draws on the esoteric spirituality and magic of her Beninese-Haitian-Jamaican lineage to address the politics and aesthetics of geographical and social displacement and the evolving realities of identity perception. She is interested in the politics and aesthetics of pain, the complexities of memory and place, identity, transnationalism, African Diaspora, Afro-Caribbean history, trauma, and displacement.


She was the recipient of a Yaddo residency, honored with the Donald and Genie Rice Filmmaker Residency Grant, and nominated in 2015 for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant Program. In 2017 she performed at the Black Mountain College Museum & Art Center. Several publications have written about her work, including Art in America, and she was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN). She has exhibited her work in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. 

Jon J. Satrom: Please follow this link for more http://jonsatrom.com/about/index.html
 
Laura Hyunjhee Kim: Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who contemplates and reimagines digitally constructed on/offline (non)human experiences. Thinking through making, she performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. Her current practice-based research projects explore emerging consumer technologies and their influence on human and (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Kim has shown work in numerous on/offline exhibition spaces, screenings, and festivals around the world. She received the inaugural ArtSlant Award in New Media (2013) and was one of the first artist-in-residence at the Internet Archive (2017). In 2019, Kim received the New Media Caucus Distinguished Scholar Award and published Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs with The Accomplices / Civil Coping Mechanisms and Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-tales of the Digital Afterlife (coauthored with Mark Amerika) with Open Humanities Press. Kim received a B.S. in Art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and M.F.A. from the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication, and Information.
 
Melanie Clemmons: Melanie Clemmons is a new media artist and educator interested in the effects of technology on society, culture, and the environment. She makes videos, net art, installations, & VR experiences and performances. In addition to her gallery and museum work, Clemmons has collaborated with Zak Loyd since 2009, has worked on videos for fashion designer Brandon Maxwell and toured with Pussy Riot doing visuals during their first North American tour and has collaborated on several of their music videos. She is an assistant professor of digital/hybrid media at SMU in Dallas, TX. 

 

In 2019 Clemmons had a solo exhibition at the University of Dayton’s Radial Gallery titled VIRTUAL HEALING & PROTECTION FOR/FROM THE SICK INTERNET that considers how the internet and new media technologies have the capability to both harm and heal. She showed her work in a special exhibition at The Other Art Fair – Dallas presented by Saatchi Art, where she also curated SMU student work and was recognized as a highlighted artist by Hypebeast, was interviewed by Sometimes Gallery for her piece on surveillance capitalism and developed and performed a body of work titled SUPER CURE, which engages with the archetype of the witch as a queer, feminist voice necessary as an alternative to the patriarchy’s insistence on a positivist world view.

She has completed a digital artist residency at Welcome to My Homepage, and her work has been shown at HeK (House of Electronic Arts), Basel, Switzerland; CICA Museum Gyeonggi, Korea, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; Aggregate Space Gallery, Oakland; UPFOR Digital, Portland; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; TRANSFER Gallery, Brooklyn; Denver Digerati; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Human Achievement, Austin; Ex Ovo, Dallas; and many other DIY spaces and venues. 

Ryan Wurst: Ryan Wurst is a transmedia artist, who builds worlds that are informed by technology. He tells “infinite stories” that are ambient and circular rather than linear and often finds himself exploring concepts of the absurd, stupidity, and popular culture. His project-based art takes form in many mediums like animation, music, books, code, performance, and video. In addition to his many personal projects, Wurst is an avid organizer and curator who has run galleries, produced many events, and continues to run the record label Always Human Tapes. He is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has an MFA in Experimental and Media Arts from the University of Minnesota, and a BM in music composition from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Wurst consistently performs and shows work nationally and internationally including Beijing, New York, Zagreb, Belgrade, Minneapolis, and Boulder.
 
Rick Silva: Rick Silva was born in 1977 in Brazil and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is an Associate Professor of Art & Technology at the University of Oregon. Silva received an MFA from The University of Colorado in 2007 and has since shown nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at TRANSFER Gallery in New York, Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, New Shelter Plan in Copenhagen, Interstitial Gallery in Seattle, and The Ski Club in Milwaukee. Silva’s projects and collaborations have been featured in festivals such as Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin, and Resonate in Belgrade. His works and installations have been acquired by multiple permanent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Borusan Contemporary Collection, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. Silva’s work has been featured in WIRED, The New York Times, and most recently in Rhizome’s book Net Art Anthology.
Nicholas O’Brien:
 
Mariana Pereira Vieira: Mariana Vieira mines contemporary topics as raw material to construct her work. From an early age, she was aware of how socio-political factors can powerfully transform individual outcomes and shape worldview.  She was born in Brazil when the country was under a military dictatorship and grew up among the residues of civil war and of foreign military involvement in Latin America. She uses the act of creating and making to transform material and experience. She has investigated transformation through re-imagining optical devices like the praxinoscope and the mutoscope, through lenticular image animations, origami installations, and recently, through transforming an encyclopedia into a  series of miniature books to give away to unsuspecting recipients.


Mariana Vieira was born in Brazil and grew up in Central America. She relocated to Colorado in 2006 and has called the Rocky Mountain state home since then. Mariana has been featured in exhibitions at Anderson Ranch  Arts Center, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and the Colorado  Photographic Arts Center, among others. She currently works at the  University of Colorado.

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